There is a particular kind of loneliness that arrives with grief. It doesn’t just make a person feel alone; it makes them feel alien, as if they’re moving through a world operating on a frequency they can no longer hear. The laughter of friends, the busyness of daily life, it all seems to happen on the other side of a thick, soundproof glass. This is where Elizabeth Grace Harris lived for a long time. She describes herself as a caterpillar during that period, a land bound creature that dreamt it could fly, searching desperately for a butterfly she was convinced within her heart existed, and that was hidden just on the next leaf, just around the next stem.
Her search was for Love. Not the romantic, fleeting kind, though she chased that, too, hoping it would be the answer. She was searching for a Love so profound, so constant, and so unconditional that it could anchor her soul. She believed it existed—she could feel the echo of it in her heart—but she was missing the mark on its source. She looked for it in relationships, in the approval of others, and within the paradigms of the religious and social constructs she was raised in. Each time, she found mere glimpses, shadows of the real thing that left her feeling empty and disillusioned. She was, as she later came to understand it, trying to squeeze orange juice from elephants. She was using all the right effort, but directed at entirely the wrong source.
Her grief was immense, and it was compounded by a different simultaneous, crushing personal heartbreak. The relationship she had dreamt of for a decade, one she had invested everything in, one for which she had crossed every line in the sand and ignored every warning, completely failed in her expectations, leaving her flat on her face. Coupled with the loss of her grandfather, the guilt and despair were absolute. She felt she had failed in love, in family, and in faith. The carefully constructed world she had built, the paradigm through which she understood everything, had not just cracked; it had shattered, leaving her in a pit of despair. In that dark abyss, she truly contemplated whether there was any point in going on.
But somewhere in that blackness, a quiet ember refused to go out. It was the persistent flickering of a simple, defiant belief: “The Love I feel in my heart cannot be for nothing. It was too real, too powerful to be just a biological trick.” If she could feel such a capacity to love and to need love, then its source must exist. She had simply been looking in the wrong places.
So, with no other options left, she started to write. Her first letter was to her grandfather. She wrote everything she wished she could have said, everything the finality of death had seemingly stolen from her. While it was an act of closure, it was also an act of rebellion against the silence. Elizabeth wasn’t writing a book. She was writing for her life.
She began writing letters to God, and to loved ones she lost. Some were more graceful prayers. Others were raw and unfiltered, filled with of confusion and pleading. She wrote because it was the only thing that made the pain feel bearable. It was her version of screaming into a storm. She didn’t know what to expect in this, but she knew she had to do it.
And a miraculous thing began to happen. The writing itself became the response. In pouring out her heart onto the page, she was slowly untangling the knot of pain inside her. The journal became a sacred space where she could be completely honest without fear of judgment. Without realizing it, she had started a conversation. The more she wrote, the more she listened. Not with her ears, but with her heart.
Slowly, imperceptibly at first, her understanding began to shift. Her journey, documented in Letters to Heaven, is a metaphor of a caterpillar who spent its life searching externally for the butterfly, only to finally stop, look within, and realize the truth: the butterfly was never lost. It was there all along, it’s very DNA coded for transformation. She had been seeking God as a distant, external judge, a scorekeeper in the sky. She began to discover the Divine as the very Source of all creation, a Presence of pure, unconditional Love that resided not in a far-off heaven, but within her own heart, within the heart of every living thing.
She didn’t need to find God’s Love. She needed to uncover it within herself. She needed to shed the religious and social paradigms that had taught her fear as a way of life, ideas that built the walls around her heart. She had to simply accept that she was, always had been, and always would be, a beloved child of that Source. Her most important job was not to strive, but to be the child of God that she was and the rest would fall into place.
The book is the collection of those letters. It is her heartfelt and intimate journey from seeking love to becoming a vessel for it. It is a tribute to resilience, to the eternal bonds that death cannot sever, and to the ultimate solace that awaits when we stop searching the horizon and finally tend to the light within our own hearts.
If you are grieving, if you feel disillusioned by the paradigms of our external world, by the fear and division it perpetuates, if you are spiritually hungry and longing for a connection that is real and sustaining, Elizabeth wrote this for you. You are not alone in your search. Her greatest hope is that through her journey, you might find the courage to start your own conversation with Heaven, and find the Love and Companion you’ve always sought. By doing this, we become examples for one another, and the world is slowly changed for the better, one soul at a time.